


Ritual.

by pollyrepeat



Category: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 08:45:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2806505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pollyrepeat/pseuds/pollyrepeat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rita had a routine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ritual.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whetherwoman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whetherwoman/gifts).



Rita meets a man named Cage after the war has been won.

He says “hello” like it’s a prayer, which is in fact not all that unusual. Rita has spent the last six months getting used to men and women saying things to her that sound either like a prayer or a curse, with very little in-between. Angel of Verdun. Full Metal Bitch.

“Hello,” Rita says back, because she finds she has the emotional space for that today, victory day, incomprehensible ridiculous unbelievable _victory day_ , and she has definitely missed something.

"Hello," Cage says, again, and then shakes himself. He tells her his first name, which is Bill, and his last name, which she already knows because he gave it to her and it's printed in careful white lettering on his uniform. 

Rita says, "I know who you are.”

There's a moment of -- something -- in his face. His smile is a little too glossy to be believed, but for an instant there it had turned genuine, wild.

"Right," he says. "The man behind the --" he waves behind himself as a bus goes by, still plastered with her likeness. The graffiti’s been washed off, though she can still see the edges of it. Not enough to know what kind of saviour it had named her.

"Well done, Major," she says. “Very effective.” The mist decides abruptly that it would like to become rain, now, and does, soaking them immediately. Hours seven through twenty-six, inclusive, had included pouring rain, and she bobs, for a moment, on a memory of mud grinding itself into her metal gears, of cold making her human joints ache. She's had worse. Cage does not look like he's had worse, but he stands there like the rain is something that is beneath his notice. This is by far the most excruciating conversation she's had in months. She is including some literally excruciating conversations in that assessment.

"Well," she says.

//

Rita met a man named Hendrix just before the war began, when Wikipedia only listed _The Battle of Verdun (1916)_ and _The Battle of Verdun (1792)_ in its clarifying links and Rita had never shown up on the side of a bus but had ridden rather a lot of them.

Rita had a routine for getting out of the house, in the morning, which was largely responsible for how she found herself outside her flat in the middle of the night, twenty minutes removed from an alarming phone call from a number that had flashed up on the caller ID as “Hospital.” Somehow, without any conscious contribution, Rita had:

  * showered
  * dressed
  * slipped on a jacket that might be appropriately warm at 6:30AM but certainly wasn't at 1AM
  * poured herself a travel mug full of horrible tea made with lukewarm water. Trying to drink it was actually what snapped her out of autopilot.



She was probably lucky she hadn't set off for the tube to work, and set off for hospital, instead, mug clutched in one white-knuckled hand, alternating between not thinking at all about anything, and being unable to think anything but MUM IS IN THE HOSPITAL, COME QUICKLY, on a loop interspersed occasionally with a voice that sounded like her sister’s and said I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU SHOWERED BEFORE COMING IN. 

The tube was full of stragglers having or about to have an awful time: an extremely drunk pair of young women clutching a red helium balloon between themselves and already making anticipatory noises about tomorrow’s hangover; an elderly man staring at his hands and having a very stern conversation about the state of the world with the empty seat beside him. Rita felt a sort of desperate, sleep-deprived camaraderie with all three of them.

“I can’t believe you showered before coming in,” said Tina. “Is that _tea_?”

The nurse looking after mum glanced up from fiddling with the IV, behind Tina’s back, and gave Rita a look that said he knew she didn’t remember showering, or filling up her thermos, and that that was okay. His name tag said Hendrix, and though she didn’t know it at the time, he would be present for the two worst days of her life, and she would be present for the end of his. Again, and again, and again, and again.

//

Cage slides into the seat next to her at the pub, where Rita is experimenting with being human again, and with having leisure activities, and with cautiously easing back on the choke-hold she’s been maintaining on her brain and on her heart.

It isn’t going well. Probably it will require a professional, if there are any left who haven’t been turned into soldiers.

“Do you need something from me?” she says. There’s a lull in conversation, immediately, heads turning in the bar to track Rita, to anticipate the violence. The setting grates at her, the yawning black hole of her future grates at her, but Cage’s incursion has somehow granted her a dollop of normalcy.

Jesus Christ, her life.

“I don’t need something from you,” he says. Rita knows this trick of repeating a question back to gain space to think, and Cage alternates between staring at her and staring at the scarred counter of the bar. The old men behind them titter a little, and Cage’s shoulders tighten. Good. 

//

She’d found Hendrix again by accident, stumbling across him on the way to to the plane for her second drop. Surviving one drop made her lucky; surviving two would make her a veteran, would win her a better exoskeleton, better weapons, a better chance. Two would prove she was worth the investment. These calculations were what was on her mind: not the upcoming slog, and certainly not a hospital room six months ago, but stumbling upon Hendrix caused a momentary jumble, tangling the threads of her mental calculus.

"... Hendrix?" she said.

He glanced up, down, up, then shrugged, pointed at his nametag -- army issue this time, not hospital. _Paramedic_ written in neat lettering underneath it. "That's me," he said. "What's up? Got a problem?"

"No problem," she said. "I don't -- god, of course you don't remember me."

She felt foolish and small, towering several feet about Hendrix, looking down at the dark curly mess of his hair. Rita was struck by the urge to curl inside her exoskeleton like a snail, hidden and safe.

Hendrix made a face at her. It wasn't unkind. His mouth pinched off to one side in an almost-smile and he scrunched his nose, somehow just as embarrassed as Rita, but inviting her to share in it. "This is going to sound truly awful," he said, "but I can think of only two situations to explain this. A brief but glorious night together, or through my --"

"Through your work," Rita said, smiling back at him. She’d wanted to smile at him in the hospital room.

"Sorry," said Hendrix, leaning back, leaving room for Rita to step closer and stop blocking the narrow alley between the mess tent and the medical tent. "Meeting through my work is seldom a nice memory."

"Well," Rita said. "You made it better, actually, so. Thank you for that."

She had to go. The plane wouldn’t wait for her, and the court-martial if she missed it wouldn’t wait for her either.

"Hey,” said Hendrix. “I -- would you like to experience the other situation? Get the full set?"

That was a genuinely horrible attempt.

"Ask me again when I get back," said Rita, and went on to survive drop two, and then drop three. Drop four was --

//

Cage drinks three Old Fashioneds, one right after the other, and absently neatens the growing pile of peanut shells in front of him.

“I’m doing this all wrong,” he tells her. “Sorry. I should be good at this,” he adds. “I _am_ good at this.”

She looks at the peanut shells. He looks at her, looks back down at his shells, and then pushes an index finger through them. A stray shell skitters off the edge; the bartender gives both of them the side-eye.

“You’re clearly not,” she says. “Creepy, yes. Good at this, no.”

“I don’t want to fuck it up,” he says, defensively. He thinks about it. “And I want to not fuck it up _so much_ that I’m fucking it up.”

Rita does not want to empathize with this sentiment, but she does.

“You saved the world,” he tells her, the words tumbling out of him like he’s been waiting to say them.

After Verdun, before anything was actually over, people said that to her all the time. You saved the world. Really, it was a request. Prayers to the Angel of Verdun: _Save the world_. 

Cage didn’t say it like that. 

“What happened to you, happened to me,” he says, and if he’d been speaking quickly before, now he was racing. Word vomit. “Sorry, I--”

“How long,” she says, then changes her mind. “Where did it end?”

He blinks.

“At the end,” he says.

//

This was the last one:

Mud, and blood, and driving rain. A series of excruciatingly exact steps. A vision of a monster.

Hendrix in front of her, Hendrix behind her, Hendrix beneath her, forever and ever, amen.

//

She travels back to Verdun because she is used to repeating her steps, and wants to do it one last time, deliberately, for just herself instead of the world, or for the pinprick possibility of this time getting everything exactly, impossibly right. 

Cage doesn’t follow. He packs her a small bag, hands it over with another too-wide smile followed by a smaller, more sincere one. The bag has: one handgun, six packets of sugar, one flannel shirt wadded into a ball at the bottom. An umbrella, in case it rains.

“What the hell is this,” she says.

Cage says, “It’s a care package.” He says, “Because I care.” Rita looks at the flannel shirt, and the sugar, and the weapon, and feels, quite unexpectedly, touched.

“I’ll come back,” says Rita. “Find me when I do.”


End file.
